She Weeps Each Time You're Born (23 page)

Soon they were beyond the airstrip. The grass was a dull brown from years of chemicals leaching into the soil. My father was a party leader, Giang suddenly said. When I was twelve, my parents were killed in a car accident. Rabbit remembered the faint voices rising off Giang's skin when she had held her hand back in the dorm. So I came back to Vietnam, she said. After my grandmother died, I was on my own. She turned and smiled at Rabbit. At least I'm keeping up my Russian. She laughed, but Rabbit could see the effort it cost her.

Now that she knew the circumstances Rabbit could put it all together. The voices she had heard as she held Giang's hand had been crying out for acknowledgment. Giang's father closing his eyes as he pushed down on the gas, steering the car into a guardrail. His wife sleeping beside him, only rousing herself at the last moment, her eyes shocked open. In the husband's mind the desperation and the feeling that there was nothing left to do. The wife didn't think he knew, but he knew. He had always known about all of them. The low-ranking Russian colonel just the latest in her endless string of lovers.

They were only a few hundred feet from the spot where Levka was last seen when Rabbit stepped on one. She felt the air rush out of her lungs. Someone's here, she said, rubbing her ears. Giang let out a sharp whistle. The Russians turned around
and came back. Giang tapped the ground with her foot. Здесь кто-то есть. The men huddled and talked among themselves. Impossible, Grischa said. He pointed to a spot up the trail. They were up by that grove when we last saw them. Giang kept tapping the ground. Grischa sighed and said something to the dog. Laika sniffed around, then squatted and urinated. The other men laughed. Please, said Rabbit, but nobody moved.

Giang reached over and grabbed a shovel from one of the boys. Without another word she began digging. Grischa pulled out a pack of cigarettes. He struck a match along the bottom of his work boot. The flame burst forth with a loud hiss. The men sat down on the ground. The man carrying the metal detector said something to one of the other soldiers and sniggered.

Less than two feet down Giang hit something. It was as if a leather glove had disintegrated, the desiccated skin hanging in shreds on the bone. Grischa ordered one of the boys to help. After another twenty minutes they could see that the body had fallen backward with both hands shielding its face, a small clean hole through the front of the skull. A large ragged hole gaped at the back.

They spent all morning going from spot to spot, Rabbit walking between the orange flags. After the first one, the noise was deafening, the whole field groaning. I hear you, she said. Be patient. At one point the Russians marked the earth with their shovels for later, the places they would come back to and dig up. It was as if they'd hit a vein of ore, a river of bodies snaking north-south. Each one with the same trauma to the face, the same holes in the skull.

They're Black Tai, aren't they, said Giang. In hole after hole the fabric was in tatters but still evident, tibia and femurs draped in indigo rags. Rabbit nodded. The Black Tai were one of the
ethnic minorities who lived along the Black River and had sided with the French. Rabbit could hear the terror in their voices. As the battle raged, the men deciding one by one and then collectively to stay in the trenches and lay down their guns. To abandon the French. It wasn't our fight, said one of the voices. Overhead the daytime moon hung in the sky like a whisper.

They shot them, said Rabbit. Who, said Giang. Rabbit closed her eyes. The French. Then she could see it. As night fell the killers came back, the Foreign Legion and the
tirailleurs
. It was a small group, ten at the most. The French soldiers were acting on their own without orders, thinking they could persuade the Black Tai to come out and fight for them if the ethnics woke in the morning and found some of their comrades dead, presumably at the hands of the Vietnamese. The French soldiers assumed the Black Tai, hungry for revenge, would pick up their guns again and rejoin the battle. Instead when the fog lifted, the French looked out over the bodies of the fifteen or so Black Tai they had killed in the trenches of Anne-Marie and saw that the remaining Black Tai had fled.

The Russians were marking up their map. Rabbit was sitting stroking the dog when Laika's ears twitched. Rabbit had heard it too. She got up and began walking toward the voice. The dog trotted by her side. Giang was back with the men marveling over the number of bodies they had uncovered.

Fifty feet up the trail Rabbit and the dog came to an open pit. Laika lay down flat on her belly and began to whine. My lion, Rabbit said. On the ground something winked in the sunlight. She imagined bending down into an open grave and kissing a bright yellow bead on the tip of a dead woman's finger, the sudden taste of honey. Then she could see Levka and the other two men reaching down into the earth, a belt of old hand grenades lying underneath the corpse which the soldier had been wearing
when he was killed. As the three men gingerly lifted the body out, the belt exploding. Tenfold. Twentyfold. Infinity. Lastochka, my little swallow, Levka said, his mouth on her as the wave crested in her body. I hear you, she said. Something glinted in the grass beside the pit. She stooped and picked it up. It was his ring. She kissed it, but it didn't taste like anything.

W
HEN THE WOMAN ENTERED THE COURTYARD, CHILDSIZED
shoes in hand, the female parakeet sitting in the lemon tree began to cry. For the past few years mourners had been coming to Hang Giay straight from the funeral procession. Most times the hearse would park out front with the six-foot-tall portrait of the deceased still draped with flowers. Then the widow would float through the grand wooden doors and on into the garden, one son at each shoulder, everyone in white like a battery of moths. Invariably joss sticks burned between the widow's fingers, her hands as if on fire.

But today was different. That night the moon would be full, the moon like a white hole on the waters of Hoan Kiem Lake. It was the full moon of the fifth month, the day the Buddha died, the unluckiest day of the year. The streets were empty. People stayed indoors, waiting for the day to be over.

All afternoon the three of them had been sitting in the courtyard shielding themselves from the June sun. The lemon trees were adorned with fruit. Linh was just coming out of the house with a pitcher of drinks made from fresh mango and milk. Despite her angelic face something about Linh reminded Rabbit of herself at that age. There was a steeliness to the child, the way the girl would slip in and out of rooms without anyone noticing. The way she too could stare down a grown man. Rabbit and
Qui had taken Linh in just after they'd moved onto Hang Giay. She had been one of a group of street children sent out each day to beg for money from the western tourists. Once the girl was inside the great wooden doors of the house on Hang Giay, Qui had cut Linh's hair into the same shapeless bowl Rabbit had worn at that age, but on Linh the haircut looked feminine, her delicate features emphasized, cheeks dimpled and pink, her mouth pursed like a cat's. Sometimes when she lay sleeping Rabbit had to reach out and touch the child's warm cheek; Linh looked so much like a doll, her perfectly upturned nose like something an artist would sculpt in wood.

Rabbit and Qui couldn't be sure how old Linh was. Between malnourishment and the slightness of most Vietnamese girls, she could be anywhere from eight to twelve. For all the years she'd been with them it was as if she hadn't grown an inch. She seemed frozen in time, like Son, the scratch forking down his face as permanent a feature as his nose or mouth. The two women had decided that when Linh began bleeding, they would officially declare her thirteen in the modern system of reckoning. Each day both women eyed her for the first signs of change, but each day there were none.

Qui sat by the fountain nursing another baby from the foreign orphanage that had recently returned to Vietnam after more than twenty years. Each morning Linh went out to bring back a baby for Qui. Today Linh had left the wooden doors unlocked after returning from the orphanage. At the sound of the great doors opening, Rabbit sat upright, the hinges creaking like swollen joints. In the air something hummed imperceptibly. Like a needle drawing blood from a skull.

The woman didn't even knock. She simply pushed open the doors and stepped over the threshold, her sandals in her hands, the sound of the hinges like a body in pain. There was usually a policeman at the door to keep the curious away. People were
eager to contact their loved ones or even just to catch a glimpse of Rabbit. But on the unluckiest day of the year the chief of police had decided it wasn't necessary to station a guard at the door.

As the woman entered, Rabbit felt something tighten in her stomach. The woman clapped her hands together in front of her face, a cigarette burning between her fingers. I have no money, the stranger said. The baby at Qui's breast let out a small sigh. Overhead the male parakeet turned to his weeping mate and softly clucked
remember this, remember
. Linh came back outside with a clean glass and poured some of the mango and milk into it before handing the glass to their guest. Rabbit hadn't even noticed Linh get up.

Why would you travel on this day of all days, said Linh, offering the woman a chair. The woman didn't put out her cigarette. She took a long drink, finishing the whole glass at once. Nothing fazes me anymore, she said, setting the glass back down and taking a deep drag, the cigarette suddenly half as long. Not even the death of our lord, asked Linh. Not even, said the woman.

Overhead Son was sitting on the railing of the third-floor balcony, his legs dangling over the edge. It was one of the grandest houses on the street. There were others like it, houses with air-conditioning and western appliances, running water, tile floors, teak furniture. Foreign money flowed in from the overseas Vietnamese who had left years ago. Families who just decades before were peasants now built pastel-colored confections all through the thirty-six streets of Hanoi's Old Quarter, each house tiered like a wedding cake.

Across the table the baby began to coo. Qui ran her finger along the fontanel at the top of the baby's head where the bony plates had yet to close. In the lemon tree the female parakeet was still weeping. A single tear rolled off the end of her beak and fell on top of the baby's head. All her life the baby in Qui's arms will
insist that she can hear voices coming from the trees, though no one will believe her. I do too understand the language of birds, the grown-up baby will tell herself when friends scoff at her assertion. The landscape will be empty except for the pied kestrel sitting in the nearby eucalyptus, the kestrel sympathetically vocalizing
klee klee klee, pay them no mind
.

In the courtyard the strange woman sat smoking, her shoes lying in her lap. After each inhalation, a thin gray cloud hung on the edge of her upper lip before she fully exhaled. If I tell you what you want to know, said Rabbit, it will cost me everything. Overhead in the lemon tree the female parakeet continued to cry. The woman made no sign that she'd heard what Rabbit had said. And if I don't help you, Rabbit continued, it will cost me even more. Lightly the woman ran a finger around the rim of her empty glass. She bent over and stubbed her cigarette out on the ground but managed to keep the smoke cycling a few breaths longer, blowing a stream of it out of her mouth and inhaling it back in through her nose.

In the lemon tree the male parakeet fluffed his wings. When Gautama Buddha cut His long princely hair and left the palace of His father, said the male bird to his mate, legend has it Kanthaka, His milk-white horse, openly wept.

O
N THE STREET OF FANS THE VAN CAME TO A HALT. TWO TOURISTS
went running by with their cameras jostling around their necks. Rabbit sank back in her seat. Outside the window the storefronts were cluttered with icons. Since the government had begun modernizing the economy, Hang Quat was rife with religious images, row after row of plaster figurines. There was Quan Am with Her multiple hands, statues of Mary and the Christ child, the baby Jesus with the face of a grown man, Mary's eyes almond-shaped and heavy-lidded, eastern. The sidewalk in front of one store brimmed with images of the seated Buddha, His earlobes elongated. But who hears the hearer, Rabbit thought.